Peel Regional Police

York Regional Police and Peel Regional Police use an Idemia facial recognition system to compare crime scene images against a combined database of booking photographs. Potential matches are reviewed by trained facial recognition analysts before being passed to investigators. The shared York and Peel database became operational in May 2024.

This entry was previously classified on this tracker as live facial recognition, which was wrong for the same reason as the Toronto entry: this is investigative image-to-mugshot matching, not real-time scanning of people in public space.

Kate Robertson of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab has said she is not aware of any Canadian police service that in practice obtains prior judicial authorisation before using facial recognition, despite that being what she describes as the gold standard of privacy protection in criminal investigations.

Update, November 2026. Peel Regional Police's own page says its system, provided by IDEMIA, analyses images against "a combined database of crime scene images and mugshots" drawn from Peel, York and Halton, "advanced through a partnership with York Regional Police and Halton Regional Police"; it states that the technology "will not analyze against real-time data", that members with access are trained and bound by the corporate directive "Use of the Facial Recognition System", and that the programme "has been extensively reviewed" by Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner. Public consultations were held in March and April 2024, and the page links to a summary of a privacy impact assessment. The page gives no go-live date; York's page gives 2024 and Halton's page says Peel and York launched in May 2024. Halton's page describes its own access as planned for "this fall", with an information session held on 7 October 2025, and does not confirm go-live.